Building on Broken Promises

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A Broken Promise

Companies owned by developer and former D.C. council member H.R. Crawford has received millions of public dollars in recent years to build and renovate housing complexes. The projects have been marred by delays and controversy. Crawford blames funding gaps, environmental problems and other challenges for the delays.

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HUD officials, meanwhile, said their management of Walter E. Washington Estates lacked "monitoring and oversight," and the agency is launching a second investigation.

"The agency should have done a better job and will make every effort to ensure this does not happen again," HUD spokesman Jereon Brown said.

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Crawford has been a fixture in District housing since the 1960s, when he began managing several of the city's subsidized apartment complexes.

A devout Catholic raised in the District by working-class parents, he became known as a benevolent businessman who would give jobs to ex-convicts or rent apartments to struggling families without good credit or steady work. He preached discipline and self-help, cracking down on tenants who didn't pay on time or keep their homes clean. Many tenants lacked life skills, so Crawford made a point of teaching the basics, even how to operate a refrigerator.

This month, at a community center he built in Southeast, more than a dozen people attended a job training class. Children ate lunch in an early education charter school with bright blue walls.

"Children couldn't play outside here before" because of the drug dealing and blight, Crawford said.

"There are a lot of people around town who want to zap H.R., but a lot of people think he's a great guy. . . . I'm one of them. He's got a big heart," said the Rev. Raymond Kemp, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University who has known Crawford for 35 years.

In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon named Crawford to be an assistant secretary at HUD, a position that made him one of the administration's highest-ranking African American officials. There, he was considered an innovator for pushing to tear down the nation's worst public housing complexes and create mixed-income communities.

Later, Crawford started a property management firm, overseeing hundreds of apartments subsidized by HUD, his former employer. He also became a developer, building, among other things, housing for veterans in the late 1990s and renovating an apartment complex in Southeast at the same time he was working on Walter E. Washington Estates.

A prominent civic leader, Crawford served on the D.C. Council for a dozen years, part of a generation of powerful politicians with strong ties to four-term mayor and council member Marion Barry. Crawford once helped raise $25,000 to buy Barry a Chrysler New Yorker to boost his spirits after his 1990 conviction for cocaine possession.

For decades, Crawford's business dealings have been mired in controversy.